Friday, 19 September 2014

The Big Problem With This Picture

The big problem with this picture:

..is not the sentiment, however overly simplistic it might be. It's not even the irony that presumably all three kids are breaking the law.

No, the big problem with this image outside anything beyond the absolutely personal level is that there's always some asswipe college-graduate social-worker with a
head full of indoctrination and no real-world experience, in a
government-job-for-life, feeling entitled by their own sense of superiority that they get to be the one who decides just who needs what
box.

That's the major flaw: it depends on certain select chosen people (usually the
absolute worst people possible) being expected to "know what's best"
for EVERYONE else.﻿

That's why people much smarter than whoever made this image realized long ago that the role of the collective/government/community/etc. must be to mandate equality of opportunities, not "fairness" of outcome. Because the former can be enshrined in law while the latter depends on a special elite getting to decide what things we value as outcomes, who should be forced to give up stuff to assist others in getting more, and "what's best" for everyone whether they want it or not.

5 comments:

OK, so who does get to pick who gets the boxes? 'Cause in my experience, barring outside interference (Law? Government?), it is usually the big kid on the left, and the little kid on the right can suck it.

It would have to be enforced, yes, but not arbitrarily determined. You don't need a group of social workers or political scientists to regulate the issue of theft. But if you are trying to go beyond the question of restricting coersion/force and into the area of trying actively enforce "fairness", it requires a whole other level of judgments. One is a restrictive law, the other would be a proscriptive system of engineering. Let's put it this way with a controversial subject: abortion. You can universally apply a law that says "you cannot have an abortion"; I would suggest this is unjust because it is an un-necessary application of force over one's own body, but it would still be a reactive law. On the other hand, something more just would be to say "we cannot legislate the issue of abortion", and make no law in that regard.But the third, and by far worst option, is to say "only SOME people can have abortions and only in certain cases", because then you need to appoint people to judge each case, no doubt people who will feel they have either the elite education or the moral superiority over most other people to be able to feel they should get to be the ones to be able to tell a woman that she can or can't have an abortion. It's the worst possible situation of injustice, because suddenly some people are legally coerced into being prevented from having an abortion, while others who meet with the approval of a special elite get to have one. And it will inevitably lead to mistakes; even if you feel that preventing abortion might in some cases be justified, because the self-styled moral justicars are flawed humans, they'll inevitably end up making mistakes.

That's so weird. I couldn't understand what you were saying at first because I misread what was going on. There's nothing wrong with that sign except for one obvious thing: the captions should be reversed.